


terra incognita

by pipistrelle, shaeberry



Series: corsairverse [1]
Category: Doctor Who, The X-Files
Genre: Corsairverse, Episode: s06e03 Triangle, Episode: s06e04 The Doctor's Wife, Gen, Scully's a Time Lord, Triangle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-08
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 17:37:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5937058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pipistrelle/pseuds/pipistrelle, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaeberry/pseuds/shaeberry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In case you missed it: Dana Scully is a Time Lord.</p><p>How does a charming, mischievous Time Lord known as the Corsair end up as a human hunting aliens in the shadows of Earth? Well, it starts on a ghost ship in the Bermuda Triangle and only gets stranger from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. message: majorly important things happening

**Author's Note:**

> We've been planning this verse in a vague sort of way ever since Neil Gaiman's DW episode, 'The Doctor's Wife', revealed that there had once been a Time Lord called the Corsair, a nautical soul whose mark was the ouroboros -- the same symbol that Dana Scully, noted nautical enthusiast and sailor's daughter, got as a tattoo back in Season 4 of the X-Files. The same Dana Scully who is also canonically immortal. 
> 
> Then we watched 'Triangle', and everything fell into place.
> 
> The first chapter of this fic is a message shae sent to me about a year ago, laying out the background and origin of Corsair!Scully in this verse. Chapter 2 is a short fic I wrote based on that foundation. Hopefully there will be more fic forthcoming; there will definitely be more essays and discussions of proof that this totally correct headcanon is 100% canonical.
> 
> "[...]though we know the sea to be an everlasting terra incognita, so that Columbus sailed over numberless unknown worlds to discover his one superficial western one[.]" -- Herman Melville, Moby Dick

waitwaitwaitwaitwaitwaitwait

so the corsair’s doing her thing to help the efforts of the second world war. she’s heard about the dangerous nautical warfare and the bombing of pearl harbor/the fact that many of the troops will turn to battle in the vast oceans of the pacific theatre of war. she wants to help prepare the allies for the event of attacks they might not have even conceptualized yet. so she docks her tardis for a spell and gets to work as a spy for the us and their allies, protecting necessary parties like the scientist in triangle, secretly using a vortex manipulator to gather information on enemy naval plans, and feeding the allied powers the technology and information to begin to protect themselves at a speed that’s natural and she hopes won’t promote more industrialized warfare for them in the future.

but then while on assignment, she runs into this ‘mulder’. he doesn’t know who she really is, but she knows he’s from the future– just look at what he’s wearing. and he keeps calling her 'scully’, and acting like she should know him and answer to that name. she hides the information she has, but then he gives it to her himself, along with the knowledge that there’s a human out there in the future who seems to know her face and quite a bit more than she expected about the 'paranormal’. he knows what happens in the war and he knows other things too, and she can’t piece together what this means yet but she knows this is important. and then she feels it, in the hallway, something that feels like crossing her own timestream but ever-so-different. and she realizes that whoever this man is, he’s somewhere she’s supposed to wind up. so she listens to him and does what she was going to do anyway (because she knew the scientist she was 'protecting’ never got to his destination, so she knows she’s got to pilot the ship right back into the triangle). but with the added benefit of (hopefully) saving his life. because now she’s got to learn about mulder.

so she sneaks back, and does some digging. for years, and years, almost a decade, before she begins to see what this means for her. she finds mulder’s father. she becomes aware of the development of the syndicate and their plans and treaties for a long-term alien colonization of the world. and she knows she has to stop it. she just has to figure out how. she can’t peek into the future to clarify, she remembers the rules about things like this, doing so would mean compromising a now-vital mission. so she waits, and plans.

eventually, she tracks down a young naval officer named william scully, freshly married. they become friends while he’s serving overseas. she admires his tenacity and loyalty, and she’s always been a fan of moby dick, so she loans him her copy to read in his down time. he tells her she reminds him of his new bride maggie, and he’s grateful for the friendship of a woman like her when he misses his own so much. and she’s been planning this, knows now what she has to do. she has to go deep cover, the kind where she won’t even remember herself. she can’t break down the syndicate unless she’s doing it as a human. that’s the only way to stay safe. and to do that, she needs a life, the life of someone named dana scully.

she explains all this to bill, who can barely believe it, but tries, because if he has faith in god, he can’t deny the reality of other seemingly divine duties. he agrees to be her anchor, and also the one who will pull her out when the time comes. she creates her fobwatch (whatever form it takes)*. and then, because she knows there’s no other way, she returns with william to his family, meets maggie, and erases their memories with only a code word to reactivate all they know (something from moby dick, i’m sure, that she hides away encrypted somewhere to find in the case that she needs it), aside from the few details she’ll need to direct her scully-life to where it needs to be. she regenerates herself to babyhood, with the same face as before (time lords can do that, remember) because mulder needs to know it, and hey, it’s not bad at all. and in the same moment she fobwatches out.** no one knows or remembers anything other than a normal pregnancy and birth of a child. she grows up as scully, something calling her to the fbi after med school, and meets a man named mulder. but then. then she loses her father, william, and loses any tether to herself as the corsair. every now and then something will surface, like the ouroboros tattoo, but the rest of it stays buried, even through her abduction and cancer and emily and crises of faith. the only man to ever see a glimpse of it is named clyde bruckman, and he tells her she doesn’t die, and she always wonders what he means by that.

and then this mulder becomes her anchor in another way, in a way that keeps her motivated in her task, even without her conscious knowledge that it’s the path she meant to follow. and one day, when the time falls correctly, perhaps that very task will help them unearth the reality of her existence.

and when it happens, she’ll have spent enough of a life as scully that scully will never really leave her. those memories and experiences are hers now, as the corsair and as scully, to serve her as she moves forward. she knows herself now, but she knows herself as a scully and a corsair that is more expansive than she could ever imagine.

there’s probably a lot more that could be tied in, but there you go. corsair!scully origin story.

*lisa later helped me decide that the fobwatch is her cross necklace, duh. more on that later.

**we also decided that by combining a regeneration with the fobwatching, she can rewrite her biology down to her dna to appear to all but other aliens/alien entities as entirely human. no two hearts, none of that. it hurts, and it could turn out to be irreversible if she isn’t lucky, but it’s necessary. (w/e if moffat can write new time lord powers to fit his headcanons then i can too) more on this later, too, as it provides some interesting insight as to why she was never abducted a second time or, as lisa pointed out, why what happened with the bees in fight the future happened and why it was so different to what happened in 'the beginning’ (see later essay).


	2. ubiquity I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “For immortality is but ubiquity in time.” — Herman Melville, Moby Dick

The decade after the war felt to the Corsair like being becalmed in the space between stars, somehow restful and stagnant at once. She spent most of it in cheap rooms in a series of tar-and-rope fishing towns on the New England coast. Not as good as being at sea, but at least she could hear the waves restless on the rocky shore, and while away the cold nights in taverns with the fishermen whose hearts pumped salt water. She was following leads that required her to retain a fixed address, at least for a while, and this place was as good as any — better, since it was only a stone’s throw from Nantucket, where she’d shipped on many a whaling voyage, as well as hunts for creatures a fair sight more exotic.

Nostalgia and sailor’s superstition had drawn her here, to the great jumping-off point for the whale hunts of the last century. Now she was embarking on a hunt of her own, what better place to gather provisions and chart her course?

She had gotten the name of her quarry from one of the poor lads on board the _Queen Anne_ , before she’d steered that doomed ghost ship back towards the Triangle and spirited her TARDIS out of the engine room. Mulder, that was what the raving landsman had called himself. Clearly not from 1939, she’d known that just looking at him, and that was before he’d started spouting nonsense about history and Einstein. And if that weren’t enough, he’d seemed to expect that she knew him. He certainly knew her, or someone with her face. Someone called Scully.

Even so, she might have ignored the whole encounter — oddities weren’t unknown in the Triangle. But she knew what she had felt, as he dragged her down the corridors of the _Queen Anne_. She knew the heat in her spine, the ache in her timesense and her teeth, the twisting in her muscles like being tangled in the rigging with a shipkiller storm on the horizon. Somewhere in the belly of that ship, with Mulder’s hand around her wrist, she had crossed her own timeline. This man was a nexus in her future; will-she or nil-she, they would be drawn together, and this didn’t feel like the sort of wind she would be able to tack against.

She told herself that that’s why she had let him off with only a clean right hook after he’d kissed her. Truthfully, it was that, and the history she’d tasted on his lips. There had been at least five years’ weight of unsaid words and deep emotions that she could feel in him with her timesense, the same way she would be able to feel the grain of a wood plank with her fingertips. Some version of herself had shipped out on a long and dangerous journey beside this human, or she’d never sailed so much as a washtub.

And it was a lucky thing for this Mulder. The last man who’d been so presumptuous had ended strung up by his fins on the mast of a 33rd-century interstellar merchantman. But he had been a common Betelgeusean deck-swabber, not a temporally-displaced human with the spine to take a punch and the guts to jump overboard, where by rights he should have been sucked under the keel and ground into fish food.

Somehow she didn’t think this Mulder had died that way — at least, she hoped not. She liked him.

Ye gods, wouldn’t _that_ have been the talk of the fishery in her Nantucket days.

He hadn’t made himself easy to find, either. After more than fifteen years on Earth, her search hadn’t produced much in the way of hard information. She was a fair hand at dredging up secrets when she wanted to be, but at every turn she found only the knowledge that the name of Mulder was bound up somehow with the plots of an alien species she’d never encountered before — a sneaking, skulking species, determined to take humanity for its own without risking a fair fight. By 1956, she was starting to worry that Mulder was playing the whale in this hunt more faithfully than she’d hoped; that she would have to catch up to him just to put a harpoon through him. These short-lived humans flickered out so fast that it seemed a shame to help them along unless she had to, and she knew she’d regret it if she had to put down a man who held his own staring down the barrel of a Nazi revolver.

By 1959, she got her hands on a battered photograph and realized with some relief that the Mulder she’d found wasn’t the Mulder that she’d come to think of as hers. But the relief was short-lived. The creatures plotting against humanity were subtle and cowardly, but they were starting to move more boldly. She was only beginning to see the shape of their plans, moving under the surface of human history like a leviathan of Biblical days, just waiting for the moment to rise above the waves and capsize any living thing it could reach.

Someone had to stop it. And she was beginning to see how.

She bade farewell to New England on a cold morning in January, 1960, when the only thing on the water was a lone Coast Guard patrol gingerly probing the foggy sea with its lights that gave more hope than vision. There was a squall brewing in the northeast, a chill wind biting through her coat, and a scrap of paper in her pocket that read _Scully, William. LTJG. Kitsap Naval Base, Wash._

She stood on the rocky promontory above the docks for a time, watching the Coast Guard ship moving blindly through the choppy surf with no notion of what might lie ahead and no stars to steer by. It could be tipped or swallowed up in a second by the violence of the sea; even its best hope was only to be dragged this way and that by currents it could neither anticipate nor control. But still it moved.

Humans. As salt and true as they could be, as much as she respected their tenacity, you had to laugh.


End file.
